Unavoidable measures

The Knesset has approved legislation in preliminary reading that prohibits illegal migrants from transferring funds abroad.

3 minute read.

Sa'ar on tour in south Tel Aviv 370.
(photo credit: Ben Hartman)

The Knesset has approved legislation in preliminary reading that prohibits
illegal migrants from transferring funds abroad. This initiative has now been
endorsed by the Ministerial Committee on Legislation, assuring it of a
comfortable majority in the second and third (final) Knesset plenum
votes.

Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar explains that the bill is designed
to create a disincentive for illegal migration – as regards both coming here and
staying. Many earn sums in Israel that are vast in Third World terms and they
send off portions of their income to families back home. This could now become
thorny – except in cases of “extreme humanitarian distress,” whereby
first-degree relatives are in verifiable existential peril.

Money could be exported
only when the migrant leaves Israel and even then a ceiling will be placed on
the amount to prevent departing infiltrators from smuggling out money for
associates who remain in the country. The maximum sum allowed would be Israel’s
minimum wage (currently NIS 4,300) multiplied by the number of months spent
here.

It may well be that alternative subterranean money trails would
appear. Resorting to these would, however, hardly be as easy as with the current
lax set-up.

These restrictions might appear harsh but are essentially
unavoidable. It is perhaps a kinder approach than rounding up illegals and
deporting them. Dispelling delusions about continued illegal residency here is
certain to ultimately work for the migrants’ own benefit.

Whether or not
we feel sympathy for the untold thousands of illegal migrants who infiltrate
Israel, it cannot be denied that this influx has created festering problems that
are liable to swell further. Even in the unlikely event that all entry points
into this country would be hermetically sealed, infiltrators already here will
continue to dominate entire urban swaths and live effectively outside society
and under the radar of the system.

Individually, each story of plight and
privation tugs at Israeli heartstrings. Collectively this constitutes a burden
that our cash-strapped and embattled state may not be able to
shoulder.

Israel has indisputably become an enticing
destination.

Illegals – mostly Muslim – from Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia,
Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, the Ivory Coast and elsewhere perceive Israel as the
sub-Sahara’s veritable latter-day Promised Land. For more than a decade, the
exodus out of Africa has been re-directed to a new exit spout pouring into
Israel.

Contrary to assertions by human rights advocates, the
overwhelming majority of the infiltrators are not refugees but economic migrants
hankering for the good life of the First World, creating an exponentially
magnifying demographic dangers to the Jewish state.

In addition, our
Western liberality beckons human-traffickers and drug-smugglers, to say nothing
of people who constitute a security risk. Illegal migrants congregate in central
Tel Aviv, Arad and Eilat, where once-familiar cityscapes have been
unrecognizably transformed.

Eilat’s mayor warned that his city is “losing
its identity.

Thousands of Africans inundate us. Every fifth Eilati is
now an illegal African... Eilat is only the sign of things to come.

These
illegals constitute the single greatest threat to Israel’s future as a Jewish
state.”

Tel Aviv’s entire Neveh Sha’anan Quarter, once energized by
yesteryear’s central bus terminal, has become an expanding ex-territorial lawless
slum where few Israelis dare to tread. It is the city’s worst crime hotbed, not
in the least comparable to anything elsewhere in the metropolitan area. Numerous
robberies and violent rapes are routinely reported there but more doubtless go
unreported.

The few Israelis left there live in fear. In 2010, 68-year old
Esther Galili was brutally beaten to death by an Eritrean illegal, Ya’acub
Bashir al-Fadel, on Hagra Street – around the corner from what had been her home
for decades. Galili was the last Israeli on her street. All others fled in
panic.

MK Elazar Stern (Hatnua) was attacked by an Eritrean migrant when
he toured Neveh Sha’anan this past Sunday.

He was beaten on the head and
his kippa was snatched and stepped upon demonstratively.

“We have
abandoned Israel’s own citizens,” Stern summed up. “We retreated from occupied
territory in the heart of Tel Aviv – a battlefield where we had deserted our
wounded.”

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